Category: Ephemera, 1979-1981
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Broken
“Broken” feels like Prince having fun, taking his new piano-recording capabilities for a test drive.
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Lisa
“Lisa” points the way forward to the kind of electronic music we’d later hear on and around the 1999 album… even in the midst of engineering his second big reinvention, Prince already had a third one on deck.
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I Don’t Wanna Stop
When Prince demoed “I Don’t Wanna Stop” in 1980, he was deliberately going out on a limb, a mad scientist sequestering himself in his laboratory to invent the future of Black music. It makes sense, then, that two years later, just as the fruits of his labors were starting to break through to the mainstream,…
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Kiss Me Quick
A sparkling ideal of a disco track that could easily have made the Dance charts if its creator had bothered to put it out.
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You
“You” was the Rebels track that pointed most directly to Prince’s future work; it’s thus unsurprising that it was also one of a handful of songs from the sessions to receive future revisions.